Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know

“Police officers still kill people in this country, but those deaths no longer command the news. I suspect that you may have had to pause for a moment to remember who Sandra Bland was. We put aside these controversies after a decent interval and moved on to other things.” 

When a tragic event occurs that highlights a societal problem, the media attention is often intense but short-lived. Instead of learning a lesson from these stories, people forget and move on, and so the same mistakes are repeated. Gladwell’s purpose is to refocus our attention on Bland’s story so that we can learn something from what happened to her.

“In all of these cases, the parties involved relied on a set of strategies to translate one another’s words and intentions. And in each case, something went very wrong. In Talking to Strangers, I want to understand those strategies—analyze them, critique them, figure out where they came from, find out how to fix them.” 

At the end of the introductory chapter, Gladwell explains how he will go about addressing the question of what goes wrong in our interactions with strangers. He sets out to analyze whether the strategies we use to make sense of people are actually useful. Just as one must be careful of differences when translating from one language to another, similar problems can occur when “translating” (i.e., interpreting) another person’s behavior.

“The Mountain Climber was one of the most talented people at one of the most sophisticated institutions in the world. Yet he’d been witness three times to humiliating betrayal—first by Fidel Castro, then by the East Germans, and then, at CIA headquarters itself, by a lazy drunk. And if the CIA’s best can be misled so completely, so many times, then what of the rest of us?” 

Gladwell illustrates his first “puzzle” (why we’re bad at telling when people are lying to us) with stories about how CIA spies were deceived again and again. Here, Gladwell shows why he chose to use anecdotes about the CIA to make this point. Most of us would assume that the CIA is filled with people who are very good at detecting deception, but even they were repeatedly fooled by double agents.